Tag Archives: Hollinger

John Hollinger receives as much criticism from the WoW Network as just about anyone else. Deservedly so, as has been shown time and again, PER fails to do anything useful.

This post, however, has nothing at all to do with PER. It has everything to do with one of John’s recent tweets:

Okay, I guess it does have something to do with PER, but only in passing. PER struggles to explain why the Pistons of the Going to Work era were so effective. By PER, the Pistons were a pretty unremarkable group while they were dominating the Eastern Conference and very nearly winning back-to-back championships. Perhaps that’s why Hollinger is looking for all the excuses he can find to explain why a team like the 2003-2004 Pistons won an NBA championship instead of a team like the 2003-2004 Los Angeles Lakers.

If your metric doesn’t work, mislead.

But I digress.

The point of this post is to apply the logic of Bill Simmons and John Hollinger to the reigning NBA Champions, the Dallas Mavericks, and their trip to the Finals through the Portland Trailblazers.

In Round One of the 2010-2011 NBA Playoffs, the Mavs defeated the Portland Trailblazers 4 games to 2, en route to the NBA Championship, as we all know.

But wouldn’t you know it, that Portland team was heavily depleted by injuries.

Brandon Roy, one-time NBA superstar, contributed almost nothing in Portland’s losses, due to devastating knee injuries that eventually ended his career. (As an aside, the games where he did manage to contribute were awe-inspiring and incredibly courageous. I’ll never forget those games as an NBA fan.)

But Roy wasn’t the only important Blazer to miss time. Former number one pick of the NBA Draft, Greg Oden, has been a very productive player when he was healthy, and he didn’t play a single minute in this series due to his own career-threatening knee injuries.

Therefore, Dallas’ NBA championship should be taken with a large grain of salt and probably deserves an asterisk.

It isn’t Dallas’ fault that Brandon Roy and Greg Oden got injured, is it? What would you have had them do, John and Bill, bench Nowitzki and Kidd to even the playing field?

Of course note. That’s a patently ludicrous idea that would get rightfully laughed out of every locker room in the NBA, and heck, every place where basketball fans gather to cheer on their teams.

Even Portland fans would read this and laugh mockingly.

Toning down the sarcasm, the obvious point here is obvious:

Teams can only compete against their opposition.

It’s not Dallas’ fault that Oden and Roy were injured, there’s nothing Dallas should have done differently as a result, and Dallas’ amazing accomplishment should not be jaded or tarnished because of Roy’s and Oden’s bad knees.

Dallas beat the teams they faced, and as a result, Dallas won the NBA Championship.

And lest we forget, Detroit didn’t just beat the Lakers; they pummeled the Lakers, a team that contrary to Hollinger’s revisionist history was mostly at full strength; they pummeled the Lakers so badly that the NBA changed its rules about how defense could be played legally.

Everything I have written here is publicly available fact that seems so obvious to me that I can hardly believe I’m taking the time to write it.

But thanks to the incompetence of professional sports writers like Hollinger and Simmons, guys like me have content long after our favorite teams season ends.